Bezos' Blue Origin Suffers Fiery Setback Building New Rocket (bnnbloomberg.ca) 63
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, the long-awaited centerpiece of the Jeff Bezos-backed startup's push to take on SpaceX. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, according to people familiar with the situation.
In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded, the people said. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode. The previously unreported incidents illustrate the hurdles Blue Origin is grappling with while ramping up production of New Glenn, which is four years overdue. At the same time, new Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp has hired a slate of executives to shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump.
In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded, the people said. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode. The previously unreported incidents illustrate the hurdles Blue Origin is grappling with while ramping up production of New Glenn, which is four years overdue. At the same time, new Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp has hired a slate of executives to shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump.
SpaceX (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's obvious most of it is because he simply cares about what companies are doing, not that he's particular smart. If that's true he's a genius, I'm sure it helps but it's not a big factor at scale. Jeff Bezos really can give a shit less what's going on at his companies.
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That's the thing, he's actively engaging in giving less of a shit by adding layers of plausible deniability and obfuscating legal liability.
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But that's really not where the expression seems to come from.
Try: "I could care less."--kind of stating it as a theoretical, but highly unlikely, possibility.
Re:SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)
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Neither of those are happening though. RocketLab is already launching their Electron rocket with partial reuse. And many electric cars are also showing up from other companies than Tesla, with Tesla's market share going down with it now under 50% of all US electric cars sold. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/business/tesla-electric-vehicles-market-share.html [nytimes.com]. As for self-driving, Tesla is not ahead of others there either, with Waymo well ahead of Tesla. Both SpaceX and Tesla have done really impressive things, and they continue to innovate, but there's no unduplicatable genius of Musk here. And since you mention Boeing, it is worth noting that part of what got Boeing into its current situation was its complacency of thinking that no one could do things as well as Boeing.
I don't think Waymo is well ahead of Tesla. Waymo is targeting a different market. You can't just buy a Waymo car and take it anywhere.
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AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
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Waymo and Tesla aren't even in the same game. Waymo drives on "invisible, pre-laid tracks", so to speak (able to deviate from them, but not designed to in the general case), rather than solving any arbitrary scenario on the fly, which is Tesla's goal. One can argue over which approach is better, but they're very different tasks and can't be directly compared.
Also, see if you can note any trend here in Waymo's locations:
* Phoenix, Arizona
* Los Angeles, CA
* San Francisco, CA
*
Re: SpaceX (Score:2)
You have to have vision solved to distinguish "squishy white stuff that's okay to drive over" and "stuff that will ruin your car or kill someone if you try to drive over it".
So, pretty much the same shortcommings as drivers in Western Washignton State. Perhaps a software rule that detects snow and refuses to pull the car out of the garage would serve many of us well..
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Call 911.
Re: SpaceX (Score:2)
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RocketLab is running the equivalent of updated 1960s sounding rockets, equivalent to the Black Brant range. They're a looooong way from competing with SpaceX.
Re:SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't exactly call Blue Origin a "new startup." Bezos founded it in 2000, 2 years before Musk founded SpaceX.
Re: SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)
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It was also much better funded than SpaceX for most of that 24 years.
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slow motion (Score:2)
It's funny that Blue moves so slowly that nearly everybody forgets that, as you correctly pointed out, Blue is older than SpaceX and was far better funded (being capitalized by Bezos, who's Amazon provided nearly unlimited funding). All of which makes it that much more impressive that Musk's SpaceX has launched so many satellites (including national security payloads, science missions, and the massive Starlink constellation) and hauled astronauts to and from the ISS while also hosting private manned space m
About being smart (Score:3)
I certainly don't claim to be a genius...no one does, but I am at least above average. I remind myself though, that no matter how smart I am or think I am, it never really seems to keep me from saying or doing something stupid from time to time.
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Note that crumpling a tank and blowing up a test article would be just another Tuesday for SpaceX; their greatest virtue has been the fact that they are not scared of breaking stuff.
The trick is to break stuff testing, and to learn from the experience and carry on.
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Yes, but why are we still learning this lesson? I understand that we blew up rockets in the 50's and 60's because engineers used slide rulers and computer modeling wasn't feasible back then, but why is this still happening? Is it really cheaper to explode rockets than to build a computer model of the forces involved?
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Is it really cheaper to explode rockets than to build a computer model of the forces involved?
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.
Why are we still learning this lesson? (Score:2)
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Computer models are *widely* used, but to test how things play out in the real world, you have to fly them, and there's no substitute for actual flight hours and actual flight data.
The AMOS-6 explosion was a great example. They basically discovered new cryogenics + composites physics that wasn't even known of before (helium causing solid oxygen to cause liquid oxygen pooling in buckles between the liner and the overwrap, and the changes in tension during pressurization causing fibre friction to cause igniti
Re: SpaceX (Score:2)
Adding a single gray stripe of paint about 6" wide to a Falcon 9 causes enough thermal shift to significantly change the reentry burn and glide paths. That is just one example of how finicky rockets are. There is so much chaos of small things having big shifts that models are great, but they cannot capture the fidelity of reality. The Stage 2 that blew up in July resulted from "a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle's oxygen system." Such cracking was a lurking flaw that was n
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Hopefully though unlike Dale you have excellent safety equipment so you can give it another go after
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FSD is never going to work reliably. Tesla will give up and buy someone else's technology instead. Others are already well ahead of them, and haven't fallen into the trap of thinking that throwing more "AI" at it will fix the problem.
Isn't it funny how when a SpaceX rocket explodes and throws debris all over the place it's a massive success and all just part of their iterative design process. When someone else's rocket explodes it's a catastrophe that set them back years.
I have a feeling we will be seeing o
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When you do it on purpose, it's a success. When you don't it's a failure.
Nobody thinks the C204 capsule exploding was a success, nor the first three launches of Falcon 1.
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Bwaahahahahahahahah!!!
Re: SpaceX (Score:2)
Blue Origin was founded in 2000, two years before SpaceX. It does not qualify as a new startup.
Musk is Steve Jobs II (Score:2)
His reason for success is very similar to Steve Jobs: He's smart but not a technical whiz, but knows how size up markets, industry capabilities, and consumers to target products. He also creates an Aura of Being Part of History like Jobs did to get staff to toil long hours for shit wages and/or stock options.
Jobs was also a manipulator and troll, although less likely to d
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Elon Musk is not Tony Stark -- a kind of super-genius engineer of everything. He's more of a Steve Jobs figure than he is the second coming of Sergei Korolev. People think Steve Jobs "invented" the smartphone, and people think Elon Musk was the founder of Tesla and the technical brains behind PayPal and SpaceX, none of which is true. Both Jobs and Musk are sharp tech businessmen with a really canny sense of when something technologically ambitious is about to become commercially feasible.
Musk's genius i
Tesla founding myths (Score:2)
Yeah, there are people who like to say that Musk did not start Tesla and credit Eberhard and Tarpenning with that (technically true) as though that makes Elon less of the "Mr Tesla" guy the world sees, but It's a mis-direction. The entity called Tesla, pre-Elon, was never going to go anywhere - it was doomed to die. Its Roadster was simply NOT going to be a commercial success, and would never have made it into mass production as a consumer product. At best, the company was a DeLorean Motors minus John DeLor
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The same thing will happen with Tesla too. Once you can take your eyes off the road, and FSD becomes safe enough, the industry wonâ(TM)t be able to catch up.
The only place the industry is trying to "catch up" to Tesla is in the USA. In the rest of the world I see far more different branded EVs than Tesla. Incidentally Tesla currently has zero autonomous Robo taxis on the market. Tesla also has zero Level 3 certified self driving systems on the market, unlike say Mercedes.
Ford and Chevy may be playing catchup to Tesla. The rest of the industry in other parts of the world is laughing at them.
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More executives is the way ahead! (Score:3)
Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp has hired a slate of executives to shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump
So that's what you do to increase R&D? And I thought you let go of the MBAs and hire some more engineers instead. Silly me!
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Yeah, that statement is, on its very face, stupid.
Replace an exec who has failed to lead or proven to make poor decisions. Hiring more like that will change the output of the engineers? Just dumb.
You gather your senior engineers. You tell them what you want. You listen to what they say about what portions of what you want are possible, difficult, or impossible, and what kind of research effort is required to move things from one column to another. Then you make the decisions you're paid to make, and ch
My favorite Asimov quotation ... (Score:5, Informative)
In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded, the people said.
This brings to mind the foreword to "Ignition!" by John D. Clark, where Isaac Asimov writes:
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstand-
ingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving luna-
tic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some
that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison
sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only
liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into
one delectable whole.
Spaceflight is hard.
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If you haven't read "Ignition!" go find a PDF.
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Vertical vs Horizontal Assembly (Score:3)
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Falcon 9 is assembled horizontally.
Re: Vertical vs Horizontal Assembly (Score:2)
But Starship is not precisely because of the learning from Falcon 9.
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Starship is not because of particular tradeoffs that SpaceX thought were worthwhile. Vertical assembly has some benefits but it's got a lot of drawbacks too. It's more expensive, more dangerous, and you can't transport the thing (or the parts it's made with) very far.
As far as structure goes, Starship has to be structurally sound lying on its side anyway because that's how it reenters.
Flight 2-3 parts (Score:2)
Not that I have high hope that they'll make deadline for ESCAPDE that has a launch window deadline at October. If they don't make it, it'll be 18 months out for the next window to go to Mars.
maybe (Score:3)
Maybe there just aren't enough really good rocket "scientists" to support this many rocket companies.
BO -The Stink of Failure (Score:2)
...still better than Boeing!
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